Using current agricultural techniques, cherries are no longer hand picked but are removed from the trees when at the correct stage of ripeness by shaking the tree, causing the cherries to fall into a gathering mechanism placed beneath the tree. Thus, the care which could be exercised by an individual doing the picking to remove only the cherries and not their stems has been eliminated. Thus, if the cherries are separated from the tree at the base of the stem rather than by separation of the fruit itself from the stem, the cherries will retain their stems after picking. This is true of a significant proportion of the cherries shaken from the trees. Thus, later in the processing of the cherries, whether for consumption fresh or for canning, these stems must be removed because they are not a desirable, edible part of the fruit. Furthermore, they are definitely undesirable if they end up in a cherry pie or the like. Further, the fruit, as it is received at a processing facility, is a mixture of cherries with stems and cherries without stems and there is no practical mechanism for separating one from the other. Therefore, it is necessary to have equipment which will destem those of the cherries which have retained their stems and allow the already unstemmed cherries to pass through. Further, as a matter of economics, this must be done automatically by mechanical equipment because the use of hand labor for this purpose is far too costly to be acceptable.
One of the problems in using mechanical destemming is the necessity of making the cherries place their stems in a position where mechanical equipment can remove them. To do this, the cherries are passed over a surface where they are subjected to constant and vigorous shaking which causes the cherries to rotate and, as a result, be turned to a position in which the stem is erected above the bed of cherries so that it is in a position to be mechanically detached and removed. This has been done by equipment which shakes a bed on which there is spread a single layer of cherries. This shaking process, however, is very undesirable in existing equipment because the motion is transmitted to the surrounding equipment and building and is, therefore, noisy and becomes the source of excessive vibration which is tiring to personnel, resulting in fatigue. It is also damaging to other equipment and to the building and its floors. It is the object of this invention to provide a solution to this problem.